​No calories, more riskNo sugar… no calories… MORE risk. Try building a diet soda campaign around that! Of course, you’re not going to see that taste of truth-in-advertising on your TV anytime soon — but that’s the ugly reality as new research confirms these drinks will make you more likely to get one of the very diseases they’re supposed to help you avoid: diabetes.

And it doesn’t take much to raise that risk.Just three diet sodas a week — 50 lousy (and I do mean lousy) ounces — will cause your disease risk to shoot up by 59 percent when compared to drinking regular sugar-sweetened soda. Think you’re safe because you drink even less than that? Think again!

Just a single diet soda a week will boost your odds of a diabetes diagnosis by 15 percent, according to the study of roughly 66,000 middle-aged French women tracked for nearly 15 years. Now, if you like to blame everything on sugar, this might not make sense. But there’s something in diet sodas that’s worse than sugar and even worse than high-fructose corn syrup.

It’s aspartame, the chemical sweetener linked to everything from headaches to cancer — and I’m convinced it’s the reason diet soda drinkers are actually more likely to GAIN weight, not lose it. But if you think the message here is to slurp sugary sodas instead of diet, you’re missing the point — because soda in any form can increase your risk of obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.In the new study, just 20 ounces a week of any type of soda — diet or regular — doubled the risk of diabetes when compared to no soda at all.